Dragon Quest V has a great story, it’s a bit limited by its medium, but you’ll still be hard pressed to find a better 8-bit silent protagonist than ol’ purple-head. He’s one of those Link/Crono-like characters who does nothing but silently suffer to help others and is all the more endearing for it. Kinda makes me miss the days before main characters started talking, if they aren’t anti-heros they only come across as annoying. Fortunately, he rarely speaks (and I mean rarely), despite the fact this game is a roughly a history of his life.

The game is oddly western too, it’s strange actually. It lacks a lot of the weird stuff the Japanese tend to put into their RPGs, destroying their own work with irritating mascots/characters and garish design, although there’s still some of that. Nobody’s perfect. Maybe I’ve just played too many Square RPGs.

Dragon Quest V is a fantastic classic SNES RPG. It really is the great game nobody played. They’re apparently remaking it for the DS, but I played the DeJap-translated SNES version.

In the end though, all it really does is remind me of Robotrek, which I’d say is an equally under-appreciated weird little game. They’re so similar in fact, I’d think they had the same creator if I didn’t know better. Robotrek is less refined, has more experimental way of doing battles (which isn’t always a good thing), but in particular, it has a much better story which makes it ultimately more endearing to me. It’s one of those games that has an extensive enough history you’d have to play it twice just to pick up all the hints they were giving you from the beginning.

Neither of these games really holds up today, they’re lightweight, somewhat childish, aging games. In the end games like Chrono Trigger will last forever, EarthBound and Robotrek are footnotes.

Cave Story

It seemed like a decent amateur game at first, but as the game goes on you realize this guy didn’t waste the five years it took to make the game (level design, art, music, everything) in his free time. The level design is heavily influenced by classic Metroid games, but takes some cues (particularly story-wise) from Japanese RPGs. It’s freeware, it’s fun, and I’ve started playing it for the second time. I recommend it to everyone who likes old-school games.

It looks so much like an NES game I suspect its actually running on an emulator. A brand new Mega Man game running on an emulator. Life is good.

Anyway, I started following Banshee, which I had tried before but left me unimpressed. Recently though, the Banshee people went all out in improving the player for its 1.0 release. It’s got everything I need, except a file browser, but it’s odd little file system queue feature does the trick. It looks fantastic, and most of its unnecessary features can be disabled because they’re plugins.

They’ve just officially released Banshee 1.0 yesterday. Unless you’re perfectly content with Amarok, try Banshee, it’s probably better than what you’re using.